The Skynode X system, from Auterion, provides a degree of autonomy to a drone. Photo provided by AUTERION
How the Battlefield Forces Agile and Resilience Architecture
I used to teach an SE graduate course on System Implementation, Integration, and Testing, and the eleventh lecture covered Validation. The question at the top of the first slide was always “Did you build the right thing?” Verification asks whether you built the system correctly, to specification, with the fine-tooth-comb discipline of the left side of the Vee. Validation asks whether the thing you built is actually the thing the world needed. One is about Truth. The other is about Value. I opened the class with the line from President Reagan’s farewell address, “trust but verify,” followed by his reminder to watch closely and not be afraid to see what is actually there. That aged well for a lecture on Operational Test and Evaluation.
Near the end of the class, I played a short NPR segment from October 2005, Military Speeds Equipment Testing for Iraq Troops [1]. An Army Test and Evaluation Command (ATEC) official, under pressure to get mine rollers and armor kits to soldiers in Iraq and Afghanistan, explained why ATEC had begun stripping non-theater conditions out of Initial Operational Test and Evaluation. The old protocol tested equipment against every climate and every scenario a soldier might conceivably face. The new one tested it against the war they were actually fighting. Not ideal. Not safe in the traditional sense. The alternative, though, was soldiers dying while the test article worked its way through a proper Test and Evaluation Master Plan. Then I asked my students the question that, at the time, the Fourth Edition of the INCOSE SE Handbook (SEHB4) could not really answer. What does validation look like when the operational environment is moving faster than your test schedule?
I was working from SEHB4 [2], which did not yet have language for what ATEC was doing. The Vee assumed a stable operational environment you could plan against. My students knew the right answer for the exam, and many of them, working day jobs on weapons and defensive systems, also knew that the exam answer and the field answer had stopped agreeing with each other. Twenty years after that NPR segment, the question has come back, scaled up, and handed to a different set of engineers. This time it is in Ukraine.
INCOSE. Systems Engineering Handbook. 5th ed FIGURE 4.4 Agile SE life cycle model.
The IEEE Spectrum piece “The Coming Drone-War Inflection in Ukraine” makes the analogy almost too easy [3]. Ukrainian engineers, outnumbered and facing sophisticated jamming, are iterating on attack drones, counter-drone interceptors, electronic warfare, and autonomous navigation on a timeline measured in weeks. Marc Lange, a German defense analyst quoted in the piece, argues that Western defense development now needs “very rapid iteration and testing cycles to find solutions”. That is a nearly verbatim description of what the Fifth Edition of the INCOSE SE Handbook (SEHB5) calls Agile Systems Engineering, an approach for building and evolving systems when knowledge is uncertain, and the environment is dynamic [4]. The adversary adapts weekly. The countermeasure adapts monthly.
Lange also imagines the physical shape of the defense. “We might see nets above city centers, protecting civilian streets”. SEHB5 has a vocabulary for exactly that kind of thinking. Resilience, as defined in Sec. 3.1.9, is the ability to avoid, withstand, and recover from adversity, and the handbook explicitly states that adversity includes adversarial parties with malicious intent [5]. The handbook also names the means by which resilience is achieved: adaptive response, agility, and anticipation. Each one has a Ukrainian counterpart on the battlefield right now. Interceptor drones launched from helium aerostats hovering above Kyiv are an adaptive response. Passive radar that reads reflections off existing television and radio transmitters, rather than emitting its own signal and painting a target on itself, is an anticipation. The rapid iteration Lange is asking the West to relearn is agility, folded into resilience as a means to an end.
Oleksandr Barabash, CTO of the Ukrainian startup Falcons, put the operational tempo into a single image when he told Spectrum what the near future of the battlefield looks like.
“Today, we have a situation where we have lots of signals on the battlefield, but in the near future, in maybe two to five years, UAVs are not going to be sending any signals”.
Read that through SEHB5, and it stops sounding like a lament. In the Agile SE life cycle model, retirement is not an event at the end of the Vee. It is continuous. The current system evolves, older versions retire as they go, and situational awareness is the only activity in the model with no entry or exit criteria [4]. Barabash is not describing a failure of engineering discipline. He is describing the discipline itself, correctly applied, under conditions that forced the Ukrainian military contractors to rediscover what ATEC worked out in 2005.
The Fourth Law, a Ukrainian company founded by a former pet-camera CEO, dispatches autonomous modules to the front at roughly $50 apiece. Troops strap them onto off-the-shelf drones, and the strike success rate against jammed targets jumps by a factor of four. That is the agility architectural framework rendered in plywood and Velcro. Encapsulated modules with well-defined interfaces, a passive infrastructure of minimal rules, and a roster of dragged-and-dropped capabilities assembled in response to whatever the adversary tried last [4]. The handbook uses Lego and Meccano as its examples. The Ukrainian battlefield has made the analogy literal.
What is honestly uncomfortable about the Spectrum piece is Yaroslav Azhnyuk’s assessment of the gap. He says the United States and Europe have progressed “from the winter-of-2022 technology to the summer-of-2022 technology” while Russia and Ukraine have moved years. “The gap is getting wider”. That is not a technology gap. It is a life cycle model gap. Western defense acquisition, for understandable reasons of safety and cost discipline, still runs primarily on a sequential Vee. We knew how to compress it once. MRAP fielding, JIEDDO, the Rapid Equipping Force, and ATEC stripping conditions from its test protocols so soldiers could stop dying. All of that was Agile SE and resilience engineering before INCOSE had the vocabulary for either. It happened because the operational environment demanded it, and it slowed when the demand did.
The vocabulary is in the handbook now. The Ukrainians have shown us, at some cost, how the practice actually looks when the threat refuses to hold still. So put yourself in the ATEC engineer’s position in 2005, or the Ukrainian contractor’s position in 2026.
At what point does discipline in the SE Handbook process stop being rigorous and become an obstacle? And who in your organization is allowed to make that call?
Optional Reader Resource
References
O’Hara, Vicky. “Military Speeds Equipment Testing for Iraq Troops.” Morning Edition, NPR, 6 Oct. 2005, www.npr.org/2005/10/06/4947458/military-speeds-equipment-testing-for-iraq-troops.
INCOSE. Systems Engineering Handbook: A Guide for System Life Cycle Processes and Activities. 4th ed., edited by David D. Walden et al., John Wiley & Sons, 2015.
Pultarova, Tereza. “The Coming Drone-War Inflection in Ukraine.” IEEE Spectrum, 2026, spectrum.ieee.org/autonomous-drone-warfare.
INCOSE. Systems Engineering Handbook. 5th ed., edited by David D. Walden et al., John Wiley & Sons, 2023. Sec. 4.2.2: Agile Systems Engineering.
INCOSE. Systems Engineering Handbook. 5th ed., Sec. 3.1.9: Resilience.
